Nicole Dular (Notre Dame of Maryland University), "Standpoint Moral Epistemology: The Epistemic Advantage Thesis"

Philosophical Studies, 2023

By Nicole Dular

It’s common sense to think that some people are more likely to have knowledge about certain things than others. This is what guides us when we ask our doctor what is causing the persistent pain in our back rather than our colleague in the English Department. Likewise, it makes more sense for us to ask our students what cut of jeans are in style, rather than our mother: we think that gen z are better positioned to know facts about fashion and style than boomers. Notice, though, that while doctors have formally trained and institutionally backed expertise that puts them in a better position to have the knowledge in question, your students being better positioned has nothing to do with them receiving formal training, but rather is in virtue of their social positioning (namely, their generation and its connection to contemporary culture).

The idea that your social identity and positioning in society has an effect on what and how well you’re likely to know something is one core claim of standpoint epistemology. Standpoint epistemology is an epistemic framework that holds that all knowledge is socially situated. More particularly, standpoint theorists are interested in analyzing how structures of oppression and marginalization in particular affect knowledge.  One of its core theses is the epistemic advantage thesis, which holds that marginalized agents are epistemically advantaged (compared to dominantly situated agents) given their social disadvantage as marginalized. We may wonder, though, what exactly marginalized agents are better suited to know. Typically, standpoint theorists have argued that the marginalized have epistemic advantages with respect to knowledge about the systems that oppress them; for example, Marx had argued that the working class are better positioned to have knowledge about capitalism, compared to capitalists. In this paper, I argue that the epistemic advantage thesis is true when it comes to moral knowledge: that marginalized agents (women, people of color, working class people, LGBTQ folx, etc.) are more likely to have moral knowledge, as compared to dominantly situated agents. Importantly, I argue that marginalized agents are better positioned to have knowledge of moral facts overall (e.g. that self-driving cars are wrong), not solely those moral facts pertaining to systems of domination (e.g. that sexism is wrong).

While this claim hopefully strikes many as common sense, it still merits an argument, especially for those who need convincing. The argument I provide has two steps: first, I argue that ethics, as a field of inquiry, is itself historically situated in conditions of injustice such that it has been constructed and continues to be largely run by people who are dominantly situated (i.e. cis straight wealthy white men). Because of this, the knowledge that ethics produces will be distorted and biased from that dominant viewpoint, at best producing a partial picture of the world of ethics. On the other hand, those who are marginalized are most well suited to see these biases and gaps, giving them a more comprehensive and less distorted ethical perspective. Second, I put forth a view of what these epistemic advantages consist of when it comes to moral knowledge. I argue that marginalized agents are more likely to have better access to evidence relevant for moral knowledge, and be better skilled at interpreting that evidence to arrive at moral knowledge. The epistemic skills that are crucial for obtaining moral knowledge that I argue marginalized agents are more likely to have include what I call sorting, significance, and conceptual competency. Sorting refers to one’s ability to accurately differentiate between those considerations that are morally relevant from those that aren’t, like understanding that what someone was wearing is not relevant to the question of whether they were wrongly assaulted. Significance refers to one’s ability to properly determine the weight that any consideration bears to the moral question at hand, for example, that a book being written by a known sexual predator is very significant to the question of whether it is morally permissible to teach that book in a course. Conceptual Competency refers to one’s ability to correctly identify cases that are and are not instances of a concept, like one’s ability to understand that introducing one’s male colleagues as “Dr.” but one’s female colleagues as “Ms.” is an instance of gender discrimination, and therefore wrong.

In conclusion, my work here goes to show the importance of considering actual social positioning in the real world when it comes to making particular moral judgments, as well as when it comes to theorizing about moral epistemology in general.